Arkansas high-schoolers sent home after wearing Confederate flag clothing to school
Arkansas high school students who wore Confederate flag clothing to school this week are angry that the school sent them home because they wouldn’t change.
The students - two or three, according to conflicting local media reports - at Fayetteville High wore shirts with Confederate flag motifs, “and had paintings of the flag on their face and hands,” KFSM in Fort Smith, Arkansas reported.
The students said they wore the gear to support a social media campaign they identified as #HistoryNotHate, according to KARK in Little Rock.
“To us, it’s not hate, everyone is saying it’s hate, it’s our history,” one of the students, ninth-grader Jagger Starnes, told KFSM. “We live in a southern state and if we were doing it for hate we wouldn’t be wearing it.”
He added: “I’m honestly not racist, I have friends that are black, I have friends that are Mexican, you know I’m not racist by any means.”
The school’s principal, Jay Dostal, told local media he was interpreting school board policy when he told the students to remove the flag clothing.
School district rules prohibit attire that “disrupts the educational process or otherwise interferes with the rights or opportunities of others to learn or teach,” KNWA in Rogers, Arkansas reported.
Dostal told KNWA he was trying to maintain a “a safe and orderly school environment.”
“We’re not trying to trample on their First Amendment rights,” he told KNWA. “We have validated that the Confederate flag in our building can cause a substantially disruptive environment for some of our students, and because of that, we’re going to take measures to make sure that all of our kids remain safe.”
Student Morrigan White told KNWA she painted Confederate flags on fellow students’ “hands, on their face, wherever they wanted it. During lunch, they had the police, the principal, the vice principal, all the deans, they were all telling us we either had to wash it off our face or go home.”
Jagger refused and wound up in the principal’s office, he told KNWA.
The high school serves a town where 86 percent of the residents identify “themselves as white and 6 percent as African-American, which is the second largest ethnic group,” according to the city’s website.
The #HistoryNotHate movement the students mentioned sounds similar to “Heritage, not Hate,” the “familiar bumper sticker defense of the Confederate flag,” according to The American Civil War Museum website. “It has evoked equally pithy responses, such as ‘Your Heritage is Hate’ and ‘Heritage of Hate.’
“A moment’s reflection reveals that the Heritage versus Hate slogan war is a false dichotomy. There’s no reason why the Confederate flag cannot stand for both heritage and hate, or stand for a myriad of things other than heritage or hate.”
Jagger and Morrigan told local reporters they plan to keep wearing their Confederate flag gear and face paint no matter what the school says. And administrators will send them home if they do, KFSM reported.
Jagger, at least, has a parent at home who backs his stance.
“I support him in anyway he’s doing it because that’s what he’s standing up for,” Keith Starnes told KFSM. “If he was doing it for hate (then) it would be different but he’s not so yeah I’m going to support my son.”